techblog 

Fedora Core 5 has just been release and I thought I would be one of the first to upgrade my machine. The upgrade process was painless but adding the nvidia graphics driver proved near-impossible. The driver supplied by nvidia would not compile.

After a lot of searching I found this post which indicated that the problem was that the kernel wouldn’t allow non-GPL modules. This will be fixed in the next kernel release - but that didn’t help me. I needed a new kernel that included the fix - and I found one here. Once installed I also needed the kernel-devel rpm and then the nvidia driver would compile correctly - except that I was using the AMD64 driver from nvidia which needs to be patched before it works. Once patched then it all works!